Re: [nmh-workers] Unnecessary dependency on vi???

[Jon Steinhart]

Ken Hornstein writes:
> >Things always get weird as one's installed distribution gets crusty.
> >My Fedora Core 27 installation recently started whining about conflicts
> >between nmh and vi.  Surprised me.
> 
> Is this a "conflict" (as in, you can't have both of the packages
> installed at the same time) or a "requirement" (you need to have vi
> installed to use nmh)?  You say "conflict", but later on you imply
> it's a dependency issue.
> 
> FWIW, the spec file we use as a template in nmh only has a BuildRequires
> of flex and ncurses-devel, and no requirements for vi.  We don't
> necessarily have control over the dependencies used by various
> distributions in their nmh packages.
> 
> As for the the editor ... we had a discussion about that a while ago,
> and the consensus was ${VISUAL} -> ${EDITOR} -> vi.
> 
>   http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2013-01/msg00099.html
> 
> Does that mean that it should be a dependency of the packaging system?
> I'm unclear on that.  I'm not really interested in requiring people to
> have EDITOR/VISUAL set, so we have to fall back to SOMETHING, and I think
> vi is a reasonable default.
> 
> --Ken

Below is a recent update attempt.  It seems that part of the issue is requiring
a particular version of vi which doesn't seem necessary.

And I'm not disagreeing with the need to fall back to SOMETHING, I just think
that it makes more sense to have an error if that SOMETHING can't be found than
to have it be dependency.  After all, that SOMETHING could go away after nmh
was installed, so it would seem like that case would need to be handled anyway.

sudo dnf -y update
[sudo] password for jon: 
Last metadata expiration check: 0:59:34 ago on Fri 09 Mar 2018 07:00:04 AM PST.
Dependencies resolved.

 Problem: package nmh-1.6-14.fc27.x86_64 requires /bin/vi, but none of the 
providers can be installed
  - cannot install both vim-minimal-2:8.0.1553-1.fc27.x86_64 and 
vim-minimal-2:8.0.1527-1.fc27.x86_64
  - cannot install both vim-minimal-2:8.0.1176-1.fc27.x86_64 and 
vim-minimal-2:8.0.1553-1.fc27.x86_64
  - cannot install the best update candidate for package 
vim-minimal-2:8.0.1527-1.fc27.x86_64
  - cannot install the best update candidate for package nmh-1.6-14.fc27.x86_64
====================================================================================================================================
 Package                         Arch                       Version             
                  Repository                   Size
====================================================================================================================================
Skipping packages with conflicts:
(add '--best --allowerasing' to command line to force their upgrade):
 vim-minimal                     x86_64                     2:8.0.1176-1.fc27   
                  fedora                      532 k
 vim-minimal                     x86_64                     2:8.0.1553-1.fc27   
                  updates                     540 k

Transaction Summary
====================================================================================================================================
Skip  2 Packages